This invention relates to electronic communication systems and in particular to a method and apparatus for showing end-users the confirmed identity of a Web site owner, and also in particular to this method and apparatus being a secure and reliable reporting mechanism based on existing and prevalent common standards.
The importance of secure communication is increasing as world-wide networks such as the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) portion of the Internet expand. As global networks expand through the interconnection of existing networks, users may gain access to an unprecedented number of services. The services, each of which may be maintained by a different provider, give users access to academic, business, consumer, and government information. Service providers are now able to make their services available to an ever-expanding user base that is truly global.
The ease with which services and users are able to find each other and the convenience associated with on-line transactions is leading to an increase in the number of remote business and related transactions. However, users and services are not always certain who or what is at the other end of a transaction. Therefore, before they engage in business and other transactions, users and services want and need reassurance that each entity with whom they communicate is who or what it purports to be. For example, users will not be willing to make on-line purchases that require them to reveal their credit card numbers unless they are confident that the service with which they are communicating is in fact the service they wanted to access. Commercial and other private entities who provide online services may be more reluctant than individuals to conduct business on-line unless they are confident the communication is with the desired individual or service. From the small and/or new on-line merchant's standpoint, they can reach a global audience through the World Wide Web but they are usually unknown to potential customers and have no brand on which to build an on-line business. For them, displaying confirmed and trusted identity and legitimacy are critical to building their brand and business.
Both users and services need reassurance that neither will compromise the integrity of the other nor that confidential information will be revealed unintentionally to third parties while communications are occurring. Security in a global network, however, may be difficult to achieve for several reasons. First, the connections between remote users and services are dynamic. With the use of portable devices, users may change their remote physical locations frequently. The individual networks that comprise the global networks have many entry and exit points. Also, packet switching techniques used in global networks result in numerous dynamic paths that are established between participating entities in order to achieve reliable communication between two parties. Finally, communication is often accomplished via inherently insecure facilities such as the public telephone network and many private communication facilities. Secure communication is difficult to achieve in such distributed environments because security breaches may occur at the remote user's site, at the service computer site, or along the communication link. Consequently, reliable two-way authentication of users and the services is essential for achieving security in a distributed environment.
Website Identity and SSL Protocol
The problem of establishing the identity of the owner and responsible party for a Web site is partially remedied by protocols such as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.
In the SSL protocol, each communicating program is assigned a key pair consisting of a public cryptographic key and a private cryptographic key. SSL uses the public and private keys for two programs to generate an agreed key that is used to encrypt a conversation between the two programs. This ensures privacy for the conversation and provides assurance to each party that only the other party could generate the other half of the conversation (this property is called two-party authentication).
In these prior art systems, a program that needs to send securely a non-repudiable piece of information (such as a receipt or a signed check) does so by encrypting that piece of information with its private key, which is equivalent to a digital signature. This technique is called signing. The receiver of the signed message can prove that the encrypted information came from the supposed sender (or anyone who knows the sender's private key) by successfully decrypting the message using the sender's public key. The receiver could also forward the message to a third party, who could similarly verify the sender's identity. Thus, non-repudiation is provided for specific situations.
SSL protocol, therefore, provides a partial identification and authentication solution for Web sites. There are limitations, however, as discussed below.
Limitations of SSL Protocol for Identification and Authentication
Even when a Web site is operating in SSL mode, the identity information stored in the underlying SSL certificate is not easily accessible to an end user for authentication purposes. Further, end users browsing the Web need to be able to know who is behind a site whether in SSL mode or not. Only a small percentage (less than 1%) of Web sites use SSL, and at those sites, only a small percentage (e.g., 1%) of all pages are protected by SSL.
In the SSL process the identity of the business responsible for a Web site is established and tied to Web site (actually to the fully qualified domain name) by a trusted certificate authority. This identity, when running under SSL mode, is available in a hidden way by clicking on the lock icon in the browser. However, most users do not know this lock icon is an active element that can be clicked and further do not understand the detailed information provided if they do click on it.
While SSL does a good job at establishing the basis for identity it has three chief shortcomings: (1) It does not work for pages that are not running under SSL (approximately 99.99% of all Web pages), (2) the identity aspect of SSL is hidden and obscure to the user, and (3) the limited identity information is minimal, incomplete and not considered useful to a consumer.
Furthermore, while SSL inherently supports identity and encryption, it is primarily focused on encryption. Use of SSL incurs substantial overhead (at least a 35% performance penalty and no possibility of pages being cached), and therefore is only present and usable on pages that require encryption such as those gathering sensitive data. A strategy for taking advantage of the identity aspects of SSL without incurring the overhead of encryption is not possible with its current design which is predicated exclusively on encryption of transmitted data.
Non-SSL Web Site Identity Solutions
While Web sites themselves can assert their identity without the use of SSL (e.g., through simple graphics and text), this identity method also has shortcomings: (1) Each Web site asserts its identity in a different way, leaving the user to figure out how to find the identifying information, and (2) no third party is standing behind the identity assertions, so a Web site can easily deceive an end user by putting whatever identity it desires on the Web site.
Use of Seals
Another non-SSL mechanism in common use by Web site owners to establish their identity and legitimacy as a reputable on-line business is to place seals from third parties on some of their Web pages. These seals are meant to portray an endorsement of some kind by the trusted, well-known third party seal provider. Seals are common in the off-line world and are displayed on doors and entrances of storefronts, in yellow page ads, on delivery or work vehicles and so on. On the World Wide Web they take the form of a graphic image and usually an active component such as a link that will identify this site as a legitimate holder in good standing of this seal.
Three serious problems exist with this prevalent mechanism. First, users do not usually click on the seal, which is required to verify association with the seal provider. Since the seal is just a static graphic image pulled from a file resident on the site's Web server, all seals from that provider are identical. Therefore the only way to differentiate one seal holder from another and check validity is to click on it. A click usually transfers the user's browser to the seal provider's site where a page is displayed stating the validity or lack thereof for the selected seal. Since most users do not click, this check is rarely performed. Also, users cannot be sure of what the check really is or what is meant to be displayed, so substituting some other page intended to represent or simulate validity (but that is actually fraudulent) is a trivial task for someone wanting to use the seal fraudulently.
The second serious issue is seal copying—the hijacking of the seals and placement on sites that are not legitimately allowed to display them. Any static image viewed by the browser is easily saved to a local disk and can be reused in a new Web page. This copying capability is a fundamental property of standard Web pages and the browsers that view them. This has made fraudulent placement of seals on the Web very common. This fact has made the effectiveness of seals for conveying identity and legitimacy on the Web weak and ineffective.
The third serious issue is Web site spoofing—the wholesale copying of a Web site to a new location for the purposes of identity theft and/or fraud. Site spoofing is a large and growing problem with several very large, public incidents having occurred and with over 1,000 reported incidents a year. Current state-of-the-art seals have no ability to detect site spoofing has occurred. In other words, if a site is spoofed that has one or more of current generation seals on it, the visitor to the spoofed site seeing one of these seals will have no indication this is not the legitimate version of that site.